Nvidia Reveals Price and Other Plans for ‘Shield’ Device

Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang shows off the Shield videogame player, at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.

Nvidia provided one of the few real surprises at this January’s Consumer Electronics Show, a plan to expand beyond selling chips and deliver a portable gadget for playing videogames. Now it is providing some long-awaited details, including a price and delivery date for the effort known as Project Shield.

The unusual handheld device–to be simply called Shield–will be priced at $349 and available in June, Nvidia says. Pre-orders begin on May 20, while Newegg GameStop, Micro Center and Canada Computers will all carry the device.

That seems pricey compared to other mobile videogame players out there, including Nintendo 's $169 3DS system and Sony 's PlayStation Vita, released in the U.S. in February 2012 at $249. Meanwhile, the market for dedicated game hardware seems to have lost momentum to smartphones and tablets, which are selling more quickly and often used to run game apps.

But Shield is designed to reach several different audiences at once, including fans of mobile games based on Google 's Android operating system as well as those who now play more sophisticated videogames on hefty home computers and would like to do so from the couch.

People playing Android games now usually do so by touching a display screen. But Shield combines a five-inch “retinal” class display with joystick-style controllers of the sort favored by fans of first-person shooter titles and other fast-action games.

Android games run on the Shield itself. But a key facet of Nvidia’s vision–laid out by CEO Jen-Hsun Huang at a CES keynote–is the ability to wirelessly view and control more sophisticated PC games that are actually running on home systems equipped with Nvidia graphic cards and Wi-Fi connections.

Just exactly how well Shield performs that streaming function is a major question mark hanging over the product. Nvidia is now describing that capability as a “beta” feature, which will improve over time with support for more PC games.

Another trick Huang showed off at CES was wirelessly shifting the images of Android games played on Shield to big-screen TVs. Now the company says gaming on TVs will require an HDMI cable, though other video entertainment can be shifted wirelessly using a technology called Miracast.

“That is the one feature that is different between CES and here,” says Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy who has been tracking the effort.

While a bit of a disappointment, Moorhead says it’s best for companies to modify or eliminate a feature if it’s not working well when a device arrives. “In today’s world of consumer electronics you can’t put a half-baked product out there,” he says, predicting that Nvidia will eventually offer the additional wireless capability.

As for the price, Moorhead says Nvidia is targeting a segment of the market that routinely pays hundreds of dollars for graphics cards and won’t flinch at $349. “It’s not a huge audience,” he says.